Been a while since I posted, but I’ve had some interesting adventures distro-hopping in the last year or so. It’s been almost a year since I got a Framework laptop (11th gen) and it’s probably perfect for my use case.
Around when I got the laptop, I found and tried Guix for the first time. That was the first I had heard of NixOS or Guix or learned anything about them. I ended up running into some issues running Tailscale I believe, which is now a fundamental piece of my daily use, so that didn’t last long. I hadn’t wanted to move to NixOS since I have a general distaste for systemd. I love how Guix works technically but it doesn’t have the packages I need, and I could never figure out how to build my own.
After that I had the time to figure out Gentoo and used it for multiple months on my laptop and desktop. I still have a private git repo to track custom packages that were too slow for my liking or ones that didn’t exist at all. I appreciate that is as easy as it is on Gentoo. I like OpenRC, the main issues were constantly compiling updates every time I used either of my computers and I couldn’t find a from-source VSCode package that worked with any consistency.
In the meantime, I had an extra server that was running Xubuntu with some services. I converted that to use MicroOS Kubic - had some struggling figuring out the quirks of MicroOS specifically, but I built a script that detailed the configuration of kubeadm from scratch with all of the installed deployments. That was back and April, and I didn’t realize until a month ago that they completely sunset the Kubic project, and now it’s just MicroOS, so I have to figure out a migration plan now. Chances are I’ll just use MicroOS + k3s.
Since then I started using Ubuntu on my laptop. Ran with that for a little until the Firefox snap reinstalled itself over the firefox package and I temporarily lost all of my bookmarks and history. Man, fuck that.
I went to Fedora Silverblue briefly, and had similar issues with flatpaks… I trust Fedora more not to overwrite my installed packages, but I had trouble configuring Wayland properly for the VSCode and Lens. Package management was feeling perpetually like a chore. This may be more so of me being unfamiliar with Fedora - I don’t think I have ever used Fedora for a significant length of time. I do love an immutable OS though.
Recently, distro-hopping got even easier for me - I’ve kept most of my files in Syncthing, so that makes things easy, and I recently redid my yubikey+GPG+SSH set up following the One Key to Rule It All guide which was incredibly helpful. But now I don’t even have GPG or SSH keys to import, as they’re always on my yubikey. I just have to configure whatever distro I’m using to use GPG for SSH, which is slightly a pain but I don’t have to worry about copying my keys like I did before.
Which leads up to a week ago, when I installed NixOS. I haven’t had to interact with systemd at all (though I know it’s still there). Everything just works how I expect it to, and the system configuration syntax is easier than I expected. I may end up moving back to Guix though, it feels like a journey that hasn’t completed yet.